Movie Theater

when I was a young girl,I used to take extra classes after school learning English as a foreign language in a Language school. There they had this big movie theater which to me at that time, was like a real big cinema, where girls were not allowed to go on their own. But this one was school's and they showed current and old movies in English. Students of higher levels used to go with their instructors to watch the movie and discuss afterwards. I was in a lower level class, so we had to sit and memorize the new vocabulary or repeat drills or listen to our instructor explaining about grammar and its Exceptions! Thanks to them all, ( I myself am a instructor now, and now how it feels to be under-appreciated for all the work you do )but it was boring, way boring for me.I sometimes skipped my class and instead went to that movie theater and sat on the very first rows,One, because nobody could see me and Two, I could absorb the film with all my body and mind.It was as if all the screen was mine and I was part of the movie and I listened and I watched..... with all my heart....
This is mainly the way I learned my English langugae. I used to watch a lot of movies in native language, I used to listen to a lot of tapes ( at that time we only had cassette tapes ), and I used to find any means of cultural connections with that language.
When I was in China, also, though I took a few courses in Chinese, but I mainly picked my Chinese with the random daily conversation I had with the people on the street, or from watching a lot of Chinese original movies.
There were times, where I was criticized for showing my students movies in class, and wasting students' time for watching just! movie. I didn't take them seriously because I believed in what I was doing. Learning a language is nothing but listening and absorbing the culture of that language into your lungs. At times, I asked my students to grab a movie in English, and watch it and write the expressions down, write the summary of the story and come back to class, presenting the story to class. It was not in the curriculum, but at the end the result was much better compared with other classes, if not in written or grammar, but in real conversational English, the reason they had registered in those classes after all.
Today, I am teaching my own native language to students here, and I am still asking them to try to watch movies in the target languge as much as possible. Talk shows, comedis, sitcomes, news, reports, films and any means of listening and cultural activities. Sometime they themselves, bring a movie to class, and want me to work on it with them. It is not only me teaching, but them designing their class the way they want it and learning what they want to learn.I just watch them, guide them, and by the end fade away. I hear them in the next door, sitting around the table and discussing the topic in the target language.